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Crossing borders in the GTA: phone, mail and city boundaries not lining up

By Sarah-Taïssir BencharifStaff Reporter

Sun., July 15, 2012

Elayne Tanner has to convince people not to use a GPS to find her house, unless you want to type in all of this: 11084 Fifth Line Nassagaweya Milton, Rural Road 2, Rockwood, N0B 2K0.

It’s just too confusing.

Tanner’s mailing address states she and her husband live in Rockwood, a village some 80 kilometres west of Toronto.

Tanner pays taxes to the Town of Milton, and considers herself to live in Milton. Many people living on the edge of Halton Region have mailing addresses in Rockwood, pay taxes to Milton, and some even have phone numbers for the Guelph area.

Why the funky zoning?

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As cities grow and amalgamate, historic systems like the postal code and area code distribution have not been able to reflect new municipal boundaries.

Ordinary mail, like letters and postcards, get delivered to Tanner’s box at the end of the driveway. But if she’s not home to receive parcels, they’re automatically sent to Rockwood.

Living in Milton with a Rockwood address makes receiving guests and parcels very difficult, says Tanner.

“We had to make up postal codes. I keep a list of Milton postal codes by my computer because sometimes that is the only way I can get people to send me things,” she says.

So she uses her street address but gives it a local Milton postal code that isn’t technically her own.

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Being forced to pick up packages in Rockwood is frustrating because she never goes there otherwise. Rockwood is too small to provide the services she needs, so she runs all her errands in the opposite direction, in Milton.

Tanner’s misleading address has affected her private practice as a social worker.

She says some local doctors won’t even refer their patients to her because they think she’s in Rockwood.

She’s stopped putting her address on her advertising.

From a planning perspective, residents living in rural areas are given a municipal address and a mailing address, says Ron Glenn, Halton’s director of planning. For fire and emergency purposes, for instance, they’d use the municipal address.

Glenn says regional governments have no power to change postal codes.

Postal code areas are set up to correspond to physical locations, not municipalities, says Eugene Knapik, spokesperson for Canada Post.

He says it may be possible for Tanner to change the location where she picks up her packages.

Municipal boundaries are determined by the province, and the GTA’s many regional amalgamations have meant that boundaries and names of places have changed often in the last few years, says Knapik.

It’s not just the postal codes that don’t match up. The distribution of phone numbers in the region isn’t always even. Some residents, like John Tovell, have a 519 area code despite living in Halton, a primarily 905 region.

Calling his next-door neighbour, who has a 905 number, is considered a long-distance call.

“When these exchange areas were set up, nobody knew what direction the cities were going to grow,” says Glenn Pilley, director of the Canadian Numbering Administrator. “Once the wires are in the ground, it’s very, very, very, expensive to dig them up.”

Local phone providers set them up in the 1940s and ’50s, and competing wires couldn’t cross certain borders, he says.

This situation isn’t unique to Halton, but common in many rural areas. For some residents in Peel Region, it’s about more than the nuisance of picking up mail in a different city or town. It’s about how they define home.

“In terms of a sense of place, it is significant,” says Brock Criger, Peel’s manager of development and planning.

Ultimately, boundaries must be drawn somewhere, but being stuck between them all makes for long explanations of where home is for Tanner.

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